There are risks in managing climate change

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This was published 11 years ago

There are risks in managing climate change

By Greg Picker

As part of its declared focus on ensuring common sense in policy approaches and the reduction of green tape, Queensland’s Newman government is proposing to amend environmental laws across the state.

As the law currently stands, businesses and mine operators are in breach of their requirements if they release environmental discharges (such as water from mining operations) into the environment except as approved.

In consideration of recent unforeseen weather events, such as the 2011 Queensland floods, the government proposes to effectively temporarily nullify these requirements in such cases.

This removal of conditions is supposed to be short – think hours, not months – and for exceptional circumstances.

In the broad sense, this approach is logical. Why should companies be considered to have broken the law and subject to penalties for events that were genuinely beyond their imagination and planning?

There is, however, a fundamental caveat to this statement: what events should be considered extreme?

As the impacts of climate change are expected to make events that are rare today more common tomorrow, and to increase the severity of these events, the real question becomes what defines an event as extreme and outside reasonable planning capacities.

Engineers often talk about planning for events that happen, on average, once every 100 years. However, climate change is expected to make some of these events far more frequent.

The Australian Antarctic Division, for example, expects that storm surge events that were projected to occur only once in a hundred years in southeast Queensland in 2000 will, by 2050, be almost annual events.

Given that many public infrastructure projects and mining operations being built today have life expectancies of 40 or more years, changes in the climate by mid-century are fundamental to the Newman government’s proposed new policy.

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It is unacceptable for mines and businesses to damage the environment in the event of floods or other climate-related events when they should have been foreseen and where steps to prevent the damage were available.

Accordingly, the government needs to ensure that the consideration of climate change impacts in its planning processes is made more robust.

While current requirements for environmental approvals do include consideration of a changing climate, these are only high level in their approach and do not require the development of probabilistic estimates for climate impacts, nor any sort of quantitative analysis or risk reduction options.

If business operators are given sanctions that remove their responsibility for environmental damage as a result of “unforeseen events”, then initial environmental assessments should have to include detailed analysis of projected changes in probability of different events over various timeframes.

We must ensure that future events are unforseen not because of a lack of vision, but rather because they are truly rare, even in a world with a changing climate.

Additionally, it is in the public interest that business operators undertake a comprehensive cost benefit analysis of all of the options available to reduce the risk from expected events and be required as part of their environmental approvals to implement those measures that reduce risk cost effectively.

It is not illogical for the Queensland government to develop and implement a policy that acknowledges that floods and other events can be truly unforseen. Indeed, removing penalties in these circumstances is sensible.

Concurrent with the development of this policy, however, must be enhancement of another; the Queensland government needs to ensure that as part of the environmental approvals process, more focus is put on both assessing future impacts of climate change and that cost effective steps to reduce the risk of environmental damage are identified and implemented.

Greg Picker is an associate director of sustainability and climate change at technical services consultancy, AECOM, and previously played a leading role in representing Australia at the UN climate change negotiations.

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